So, after our 13 hour flight from hell between Vancouver and Hong Kong we landed at 5:30AM Hong Kong time. We were VERY relieved to be on solid ground again and not cooped up in an airplane. We picked up our luggage and we were very eager to get to our hotel room for some much needed rest. And from this point on everything sort of went wrong.
I had Googled the address of the hotel and found that it was near a stop called Chueng Sha Wan so we took the subway there with all our luggage and went to the address, which took a while due to the lack of creature comforts such as 3G internet and GPS. This was probably quite a weird site since we were both wearing huge backpacks and dragging our luggage. When we got there the place was actually an arcade. Yes! an arcade! so we obviously had the wrong address.
After asking some security people at a shopping center we found that the hotel was actually at a subway stop called Chueng Wan, notice the lack of the Sha. The person actually wrote this down for us so we could remember. There was supposed to be an exit called B3 and hotel shuttles running.
When we got back to the subway station we found that there was no Chueng Wan station. There was a Shueng Wan and a Tsuen Wan station. Both of these when spoken sound very similar so we were at a loss. Shueng Wan is on Hong Kong Island and Tsuen Wan is up in the northern portion of the city. Since the address of the hotel said 353 Castle Peak Road, Hong Kong, Hong Kong, we just figured that the place to go was Shueng Wan. WRONG!
We stepped out of the subway station and there was no exit B3. We went to exit B and there were definitely no hotel shuttles. After standing there for a while we asked someone where an internet cafe was located. When we got to the internet cafe I googled the name of the hotel, Royal View Hotel, and found out there there are actually TWO 353 Castle Peak Roads. The other Castle Peak Road is Castle Peak Road (Ting Kau), because it is near the Ting Kau beach. And this mythical place was where we needed to be, and it was by the TSUEN WAN station which was on the opposite side of Hong Kong.
So we got to Tsuen Wan station and jumped on the Shuttle to the hotel and there we were. Now the next hiccup comes along. We were actually pretty hungry and just waiting for a friend to get off work so we could drop our heavy luggage off with her. We will only be taking the backpacks with us as mention in my last entry on the subject. So starving and tired, always a bad combination, we went to eat in the hotel restaurant. Then we came back to our room with a bad case of food coma and promptly fell asleep for 6 hours. We meant to sleep for 3. OOPS! tired and food coma is an even worse combination than tired and starving!
I woke up, looked at my watch, did the mental conversion to Hong Kong time and then thought “oh F***nuts!!!” it was 7:30PM. I was supposed to call my friend at 4:30PM and meet her around 5 and then leave for the airport to catch our flight at 9:10PM. It was obvious we were not gonna make it so we didn’t even try. 200 dollars EACH later, we had our flights to Thailand for tomorrow 9/15/2010.
Later I figured out what went wrong. I was so stupid tired that when I set my alarm I set it for 4:30PM which was the Hong Kong time that we needed to call our friend. The only problem was that my watch was still set for West Coast USA time haha. I guess, that’s what you get when you combine super tired, more than 24 hours traveling, and extreme hunger.
But all in all it turned out pretty well, other than the extra 200 dollars. We got to actually have dinner with our friend which was really nice.
So yeah, today in Hong Kong was a good day! Hopefully when we are back at the end of October we will really get to see and experience all the cool looking things that we passed by at light speed today. The Mong Kok stop looked exceptionally interesting and the Cheng Sha Wan stop is supposedly where the crazy electronics place is located. We’ll have six weeks, so I am sure we’ll explore all that and more.